Tarik O'Regan: Parsing Variations

Commissioned by Oundle Music Trust for ‘Oundle for Organists’ with support from PRS for Music Foundation and Arts Council England. First performed by Robert Quinney on Saturday 24th July, 2010, as part of the Oundle International Festival.

Original theme by Jenny Barry

In computer science and linguistics ‘parsing’ is the process of analyzing a text (or set of instructions), made of a sequence of tokens (forexample, words), to determine its grammatical or syntactical structure.I’ve tried to couple this idea with that of the traditional idea of theme and variations. The theme in this case was provided by Jenny Barry, thewinner of a competition held by the Oundle International Festival and ‘Oundle for Organists’, inviting young musicians aged 16 and under andliving in East Northamptonshire to compose a theme that could be used in this and future ‘Oundle for Organists’ commissions. Instead ofexplicitly stating this theme at the start of the piece and working from there, I’ve taken some of the most identifiable elements of Jenny Barry’sthematic idea and used them in various ways to slowly build up, incrementally, the structure of the work as a whole.Tarik O'Regan